Converting an ORACLE® character set from an international Organization for Standardization (ISO) character set to a UTF8 character set typically entails significant system downtime and the use of significant storage resources because some of the non-ASCII characters need to be transformed from a single-byte character to a multi-byte character. However, when converting text from ISO to UTF8, all characters are converted, regardless of whether each specific character needs to be converted to a multi-byte character or not. To minimize the effort, it is preferable to convert only those characters that must be converted to the multi-byte format, which will minimize the downtime and the storage required. Problematic characters are usually a small percentage of the overall number of characters.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.